1. Technical Field
The invention relates to policy distribution in connection with records retention and records management. More particularly, the invention relates to records retention policy management, records management, and enterprise integration. Still more particularly, the invention concerns building a workflow layer that allows multiple forms of policy propagation between Enterprise Retention Management Systems (ERMs) and Records Management Systems (RMSs).
2. Description of the Prior Art
Corporations use Records Management Systems (RMSs) to fulfill their obligations in preservation of important company records for regulatory compliance and electronic discovery for litigation. Historically, RMSs evolved as departmental solutions, where record classification and disposition policies were set up and maintained locally, i.e. on an RMS instance level. Development of retention policies was perceived as a simple task; and RMSs were not designed to support complex workflows in this area.
However, it turned out that departmental solutions do not satisfy corporate needs for at least the following reasons:                Departments do not have enough domain expertise to come out with proper retention policies. Retention policy is defined by applicable laws, laws need research, and legal knowledge is not the strength for Line Of Business (LOB) employees.        There is a tendency to over-preserve business data, which could have been destroyed otherwise, when it comes to LOB manager's decisions. This leads to an uncontrolled increase of retention periods, resulting in greater legal and compliance risks and electronic discovery and storage costs.        When it comes to electronic discovery, legal departments have to know which documents exist at the enterprise. This cannot be achieved reliably without centralized retention policies followed uniformly on LOB level.        
To address these issues, corporations started implementing Enterprise Retention Management (ERM) applications, such as Atlas ERM from PSS-Systems (Mountain View, Calif.). These applications provide a centralized workflow for managing retention schedules for the entire corporation.
However, integration between ERMs and RMSs to achieve automated policy retention policy propagation from ERMs to RMSs proved to be challenging for multiple reasons, some of which are:                RMSs have never been designed to be interoperable, although basic concepts are similar in majority of RMS products. Therefore, it is hard to build a common integration layer on top of them        Very often there is no economical sense to implement fully automated integration between RMSs and ERMs. A well designed solution should be able to handle multiple levels of integration, e.g. no integration at all, file exchange, and/or programmatic integration, in uniform fashion providing similar services and process visibility to all participants        